Perhaps I can begin the story of my night in New York as the owner of an iPhone with the woman in the plunging red silk top and the jeans so tight they were yelping - just one of the herd of stunning creatures who roam the city as if they were gazelles in a park, quick and nervous.
It's Saturday night, 24 hours after the launch of the much longed-for iPhone; a concert tent in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. I take the slim silver rectangle out of my pocket quietly, as if I am checking messages. You don't need to overdo it.
It's as if she's been recharged with a fresh battery herself.
"Can I see it?" she says, and I of course wonder if she's speaking in metaphors.
"What do I get?" I ask.
"What do you want?" she says, without missing a beat.
A silver status symbol
To have an iPhone in New York City at the moment is to be a status god.
That was crystal clear the moment the first buyers emerged from the bowels of Apple's flagship store on Fifth Avenue on Friday, their matte black iPhone bags held high in the air. Even the spectators burst into applause. Something sub-rational was going on.
A few blocks east and south, on Park Avenue, a hedge fund analyst named Jose Torres emerged with his own. He'd been planning to stay in that evening, to fiddle with his gizmo.
"But now that I have this, I probably will go out. I think it'll be interesting to be a single guy in Manhattan with an iPhone for a couple of days at least. Or if they sell out, for a week."
A cellphone? In Manhattan, the city that prides itself on being hard to impress?
"Anyone who says they're not excited about the iPhone as a status symbol," Mr. Torres said, "is lying."
"The buzz is that it's the It accessory this weekend." This from Chip Brian, the president and CEO of Comdex, an online news aggregator. Mr. Brian was wearing shorts and walking his dog; a resident of Manhattan, he was well-acquainted with the ziggurat of New York City status. For instance, he didn't stand in line all night for his phone. He sent a couple of interns to do it for him. The iPhone was a birthday present for his daughter.
This is the strange, almost touching thing about New York City: Here, in what's arguably the most cosmopolitan city in the world, nearly a quarter of a century after the first cellphone appeared on the streets of Chicago (on Oct. 13, 1983), in a country where there are now 239 million of the damn things (there were only 340,000 in 1985) - the cellphone is still a Manhattan status symbol.
New Yorkers wear their cellphones the way they wear eyeglasses or hats or shoes, as fashion. At any given intersection you can see a dozen people talking on mobiles - one armed, handless, holding it in front of their faces - but always talking. There are so many people on cellphones so much of the time, often so rudely, July has been deemed Cellphone Courtesy Month.
In China, where life forces most people to be conformists, cellphones are a route to privacy, a handful of individuality. In New York, where everyone is an individual, the cellphone is a way to belong to the collective character of the city. In New York time is money; the money wasted walking can be made up by talking.
This operates on the level of the groin and the level of the brain. Claude Gill is from Queen's, and not a Manhattanite, but he has still just spent 600 beans on an iPhone for his girlfriend. He knows it's a status symbol. "Definitely will be," he says. "Be up there with Cristal champagne. It means you have some money to spend, number one. Number two, you have a job that pays well. And three, it's the latest thing out. The human being wants that. It shouldn't be that way, but it is." New York is the City of Desire because it never apologizes for what it desires.
Last spring at Prada on Fifth Avenue, you could shell out $700 (U.S.) for a Prada touchscreen phone: having issued the first luxury designer talker, the store now deigns not to sell them. A few blocks north, Tiffany's sells one cellphone "accessory": a three-inch-long piece of rubber, capped in sterling silver at either end, for $95. It is a cellphone strap, not that you'd know.
Saks Fifth Avenue has Voce, its exclusive cellphone and service plan: one of four premium handsets, unlimited everything, free annual upgrades, and round the clock personalized operators (you never hear a recorded voice). They'll send flowers, set up a phone for travel abroad, make dinner reservations "or just a spur-of-the-moment update on your favourite golf pro's score."
The service starts with a $500 membership fee, "designed to simplify your mobile life at the touch of a button." Perhaps you did not realize you had a mobile life. But how you communicate will soon be as important as what you wear.
In New York, this mobile life happens on foot, in public, which is why phones matter. "A lot of New Yorkers don't really have land lines," Mishell Kim, the Voce rep at Saks, points out. "Because they spend so little time in their homes." They also don't drive, and cells don't work on the subway.
"So I commute on foot," says Caryn Conley. "And that's when I catch up with my phone calls. It's probably that everywhere else, people do that in their cars." On the street you can hear what they're saying: deals, a lot of the time, girls telling their boyfriends where they are, and from what you can overhear, New Yorkers use their commuting time to check in on their parents. The number of cellphone conversations you hear New Yorkers having about the care of their parents is astonishing.
Up and runningGetting an iPhone so I can be iMan for a night is almost as complicated as negotiating peace in the Middle East. The only time I asked if I could examine one, the owner said yes, but wouldn't ... quite ... let go of it.
I can buy one, but there are strict conditions. It has to be activated through iTunes and works only with a two-year service contract from AT&T, the iPhone's exclusive carrier, at $59 (U.S.) a month. That's $1416 - to operate a phone that won't work in Canada for at least a year.
Even if I was willing to waste the money, I can't open an AT&T account without a U.S. social insurance number. Not that that's stopping Americans: according to insiders at AT&T, the company hoped to open 200,000 accounts over i-launch weekend. By Saturday night, the number was moving past 250,000.
But I have a plan. I buy a phone, for $600. Then I head out to Brooklyn, where I have been invited to a barbecue by Scott Conley and his wife Caryn.
I'd met Conley in the Fifth Avenue lineup for the iPhone, where he'd been living for two days on the sidewalk. He was number 12. Unlike many oddballs at the front of the line, Conley actually has a job: He's an accomplished software engineer at ThoughtWorks, an up-and-coming software design firm, and a big fan of Apple. He already has an iPhone, but if anyone will buy mine, he will.
For an hour and a half over hamburgers in his back garden we talk about technology, while his friends, Aaron Franklin (an investment analyst) and Aaron's wife TaeRa (a bankruptcy lawyer) fondle Conley's phone. Caryn, Conley's wife (she's writing her doctoral dissertation at business school on the ways technology affects human behaviour and society), is the only one not interested in the iPhone. "It just seems like a big fad to me," she says.
Conley is the kind of guy who makes you realize that we live at a time when engineers are the coolest guys in town. He is rare in that he can explain software as clearly as he designs it.
An example. Tech reviewers are already complaining that the iPhone makes a user return to the home screen when he or she wants to switch functions, instead of letting them jump wherever they want. But Conley explains that this is intentional: Apple can now see which shortcuts through the phone's software are most wanted, and create them with a simple upgrade delivered to each iPhone over the Internet through iTunes.
The alternative would be the infinitely more expensive and limiting route of trying to design all possible desirable shortcuts into the software ahead of time. This is one reason Conley thinks Steve Jobs, the head of Apple, is a genius, which in turn leads to the iPhone status syllogism: a) the iPhone was designed by a genius; b) I have an iPhone; c) therefore I am a genius.
But an hour later, Caryn texts her husband from across the patio (the sort of thing techy people do): "I want Ian's cellphone."
Yes ma'am. We strike a deal. I will sell them my brand new unwrapped and unusable iPhone at a discount; in return, for a night, they'll lend me Scott's, which is fired up and raring to go. I leave with the iPhone in my pocket. I am so modern.
An onslaught of attention I imagine being a celebrity is a little like this.
Whenever I take the iPhone out of my pocket and hit the home button and light up the flat bright glass of the screen, people flock to my side.
It doesn't matter if someone is 14 or 44, man or woman: They want to talk to me. I call some friends at their cottage in northern Ontario, and even they're thrilled: "This is the first iPhone call ever made to Wegamin Island," the owner gushes.
Women make noises; men go intensely watchful. They smile and thank me. They like the buttonless screen, and scrolling and flicking; they like to touch its silver side, its smooth curved edge, and especially to do the famous "pinch," making pictures bigger and smaller with their fingers. They all say the same thing: "It's so pretty."
No one stumbles, or is at a loss for words: Their enthusiasm leaps out of them. The world is one, man.
Better still, I'm the hit of the tent. A woman in her forties named Donna Warner is in raptures; so is Caroline Lesley, an actress and Entertainment Tonight interviewer in her twenties. The last time a woman in her twenties approached me was when I was 20. They should have called it the HiPhone.
A young woman named Kate Barrette actually makes a moaning scream - "Oooooooeeeeaahhhh!" - and begins to touch the case at the same time her friend Maurita Baldock says "Oh my God! You have one! I thought it was one, but I didn't want to say."
Meanwhile in my head I'm humming Dean Martin's Memories Are Made of This ("Your lips/And mine/ Two sips of wine"), which Conley has dumped into the iPod compartment of the iPhone, maybe intentionally.
Basking in this onslaught of attention - more attention than I have ever received - it doesn't matter to me that typing on the touch keyboard is awkward at first, especially if you have big hands; or that the screen is so flick-sensitive it's easy to shoot yourself out of one function and into another. Details! They do not matter. I am the iGod.
It's only when we get on the subway and the phone makes the round of the car without me, and when Christian Campbell, a young Montreal filmmaker, says "that phone is the most popular guy at the party," that I realize: It has instantly become more popular than its owner.
About then Maryann Jones, the girl in the red top, appears again, and touches my iPhone. "Can I call Sweden?" she says. "I know a guy in Sweden."
"No," I say, and I am quite firm. "You can't."
Ian Brown